If you were from a large family you know what it means to wait for the hand-me-downs. Along with the horrific items you never wanted there was always some really popular jacket or sweater that you saw make its way from sibling to sibling before it was finally YOUR TURN. I was the youngest so I had to wait a long time and I could keep it as long as I liked. Which means I’m used to this. I’ve always said that beaver wisdom on the pacific starts in Washington, trickles down to Oregon and will eventually get to California. Which means that even though Oregon is behind their older brother, they are still way, way, smarter than us.

Here’s another example of how much smarter Oregon is than California.

Bringing beavers back to the Beaver State

C’waam and Koptu were once a staple meal for the Klamath Tribes. They’re a rarity now — members are allowed to catch only two of the suckerfish a year. The ray-finned C’waam, with its long snout and the smaller white-bellied Koptu, with a large head and lower notched lip, are only found in the Upper Klamath Basin.

The tribal government has tried various tactics to restore fish populations: raising young fish to older ages before releasing them in the lakes, monitoring water quality, working with landowners to restore riparian habitat, and bringing a lawsuit, which was eventually dropped, against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to save the C’waam and Koptu. Now the tribes are turning to an unlikely hopeful savior: the beaver.

“Their activity is a driver for the productivity and diversity for the whole ecosystem,” said Alex Gonyaw, senior fisheries biologist for the Klamath Tribes in Southern Oregon and Northern California.

Well isn’t that a true thing! Thanks Alex whom I’ve never met but feel we’re going to be fast friends soon enough! Yet another reason to appreciate beavers. Will the list ever be completed?

Two bills currently moving through the Oregon state legislature would respectively prohibit the taking of beavers on federally managed public land and exclude beavers from being classified as predatory animals.

“We hope fish biodiversity would increase and we would have an opportunity for tribal fishing rights to return,” said Alex Gonyaw, a senior fisheries biologist with the Klamath Tribes.

“Our aim is to work with nature not against it,” Gonyaw explains. The tribal government, which hopes to establish a stable fish population as a food source, wanted to reshape the land to provide healthy fish habitats. But they didn’t want to use bulldozers to reshape the Williamson River. “We needed to hold the water back, and beavers do that naturally.”

There’s a lot of things beavers do naturally, you better sit down while I review then, Restore fish, save water, improve birds, remove nitrogen, prevent fires. Oh I could go on and on.

Beavers, a keystone species, have been found to help mitigate the spread of wildfires, thanks to their water-damming habits.

Gonyaw hopes the tribes’ efforts at attracting beavers — by using natural posts and woven willows to give the animals a foothold to make dams — will start to hold back water and that the historic vegetation, of local lily pads and bulrushes, will return.

“And we’ll eventually have a shallow lake wetland system again,” Gonyaw said. “If there is continuous standing water here, we hope fish biodiversity would increase and we would have an opportunity for tribal fishing rights to return.”

First you get the beavers, then you get the fishes, Yes that’s the way it works.

The two proposed laws moving through the state legislature — HB 2843, which protect beavers on public lands, and HB 2844, which would take them off the predator list, would mean stricter policies around how, when, and where they can be killed — could make an “enormous” difference in improving the health of Oregon’s landscape and biodiversity, said Suzanne Fouty, a hydrologist who helped legislators craft the bills.

“It is really serious what we are faced with, and we have very little time left to create conditions that help our wild and human communities be somewhat buffered against the impacts of climate change,” Fouty said.

Hi Suzanne! We knew you’d show up in this article eventually! Isn’t retirement fun? You get to tell the truth about beavers and it doesn’t matter whose toes you cross to do it!

Carl Scheeler is wildlife program manager for Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation,  Scheeler describes beavers as the “Indian Corps of Engineers,” holding the soil back during floods, creating an opportunity for water to stay longer in the system.

“They create habitats which support all other wildlife in the system,” Scheeler said. “When we’re talking about righting the wrong that has been done by past land management, we can reset things back to far enough where the beaver can then take over and recreate the habitat they used to create all over North America. We would not have the landscape that we have if it were not for beaver.”

And, he adds, the land is “without a doubt” in a better, healthier condition than neighboring land where there are no beavers.

Carl! Another friend for the making! Can I saw how impressed I am with your work and advice?

“Jakob Shockey, is executive director of The Beaver Coalition, a nonprofit working to increase public and private landowner support for beavers.

“They’re so important for the environment that we can’t afford to have them trapped out,” Shockey said, particularly when it comes to wildfires, which in 2020 were the most destructive in the state’s history, burning more than 1 million acres. Beaver dams create pockets of lush, saturated landscape that resists fires.

It’s vital (Oregonians) have the ability to make better beaver habitat and give landowners the tools they need to peacefully coexist with the animals. They’ll travel up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) to find new habitat, but it’s hard for them to start from scratch,” he adds.

“There’s a love/hate relationship with beavers in Oregon,” Lum said. “A constant push-pull. Beavers are running out of places to be because man wants to live there too.” 

“We need to stop killing beavers where they choose to live,” Shockey said.

Can I get an amen?

Call this the money quote. It’s  my favorite in a series of champions. Lucy Sherriff, the free lance author from California, did a fantastic job. But she needs to be doing something about California beavers next. AHEM. Maybe a certain beaver summit that changed the landscape a little.